Bonum Certa Men Certa

Will Wayland Even Survive the Collapse of IBM? X11 Likely Will.

Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer

One of IBM’s stated reasons for pulling investments in actually important Linux software is that they need to focus on Wayland.



I recently read on the mailing list, one of the Wayland developers basically admitting that they break the APIs and ABI all the time and usually don’t even get much “mileage”, so to speak, out of doing it. This shows, to me, that they rushed it out the door way before it was ready.



Developers tend to have noticed this. However, IBM doesn’t care. Their goal is to throw their weight around and make everyone use Wayland, even though it’s horribly broken.



All of the hideous things that X11 does were either fixed by extensions and patching over the last 39 years or don’t really matter much anymore.



In some cases, complaints about how X11 does things that “justified” starting over don’t even happen anymore.



For example, one of the Wayland developers (in an article that propagated to Phoronix) used an example of Flash and Java being subwindows of the Web browser.



Well, NPAPI (and Chrome’s version, PPAPI) is dead.



For better or worse, everything that an NPAPI (PPAPI) plug-in did is handled by the browser and the browser window now, so we no longer run into this problem in the window that IBM Red Hat says is the only one on your screen that matters.



(Because downloading an entire office program into your browser, which needs networking and someone else’s permission to continue running, is cool and modern.)



It dawned on me that while I was trying to get Fallout 4 working (in my recent post), almost all of the serious issues with the game that weren’t just some package that didn’t come pre-installed on openSUSE were actually Wayland problems, and not just Wayland problems, XWayland problems.



XWayland has its own special problems while running on Wayland that don’t happen when you just run your window manager on X11 directly.



Is X11 old? Sure. Does it matter much? Not if you ask me, as a user.



I would much rather have SeaMonkey and other X11 applications show up clean, crisp, clear, and scaled right, than smudgy and vaguely reminiscent of “Microsoft Glaucoma-vision”, which is what I refer to as the way Windows 10 and 11 scale things incorrectly and then put “Vaseline on the fonts”. This is just shoddy craftsmanship.



If you can believe this shit, Microsoft actually patented that (since expired), and called it a feature. It looked like the original edit of Star Wars where Luke Skywalker was hovering around on his speeder on Tatooine and George Lucas said they hid the wheels under it by smearing a blob of Vaseline on the camera lens.



Wine, which is a very important program to me, runs Windows programs. It uses X11.



When it runs on XWayland it picks up lag and stability problems and passes them along to the Windows programs and games I want to run.



When I double-click on Fallout or something, I want my game to run. Not skip frames and then jitter and die because XWayland doesn’t work properly, STILL.



One of the reasons I give to Windows users for why they should switch to Linux is that I’ve had really good luck with Wine. Wine is still not ported over to use Wayland and it’s not clear when or if it will ever be.



The openSUSE project avoided so much drama, so many difficult people, and so much political nonsense and technical problems by remaining with KDE and bothering to ship a version of it you can use.



One of the reasons IBM Red Hat dropped KDE entirely is that they were hoping to inflict a mortal wound, the same reason IBM supported defamation of an elderly man (Richard Stallman, who is 70.) and then stopped paying for GNU software development, but they still “freeload” off it.



Roy Schestowitz tells me he’s rarely seen IBM hiring Germans who have worked on KDE.



That’s fine by me if it’s true. That just means that we won’t have the most competent people going to work for IBM, being told to do dumb pointless redundant broken shit with GNOME and Wayland, and hiding under a desk when the Pointy Hair Boss goes by laying people off.



If Wayland still isn’t working right after 15 years, if it still behaves like some bugged, crummy, perpetual beta software, when will it work right?



I’m actually amused that IBM Red Hat considers it so production ready that it’s been in “Enterprise Linux” for a while.



Sure, as a user of an Enterprise Linux clone (or RHEL), you could fight your way like a salmon swimming upstream, using the last of its energy and time on Earth to lay eggs and die, fixing all of the really terrible engineering decisions IBM has made for you.



Some of the clones support BtrFS and DTrace (Oracle), and I think KDE is available as unofficial packages, but I think the Enterprise Desktop really deserves better software, and the developers of openSUSE realize that moving crackpot shit like Wayland over to a stable Linux distro just turns it into “Fedora with older packages”.



Some distributions, especially Red Hat, have this odd sort of definition of stability.



This definition means the software might be full of bugs, it might glitch, but at least it doesn’t change much. To those ends, IBM even ignores security patches.



And I guess I can see why you would shove Wayland in a desktop on an enterprise distro, when soon after, you divest from desktop work anyway.



It can load Firefox. It’s perfect. Firefox loads Office 365. Firefox and Office 365 are the only two things people should want to use.



What? You want to run software? On your computer? Oh…



It’s true that maybe in some tortured way, years from now, it will replace most of what X11 can do and, maybe someday Wine will work properly with XWayland. But it’s still not now.



Even on Fedora with GNOME I was still running into Wayland problems.



I wouldn’t be surprised if X11 outlives Fedora, RHEL, IBM, and on into the next century.



It’s become a fixture, like an old refrigerator that never breaks down.



KWin running so reliably on X11, mostly at parity with all of the redundant work just needed to get it working at all on Wayland (except that the Wayland version of the code isn’t quite stable), sort of proves that this has all been rather something of a misadventure of negative work that’s gone on for years.



IBM has been throwing out a lot of FUD about X11 being “abandoned”, but the mailing lists tell a story of something that still gets a lot of development attention considering that it’s 39 years old and feature complete, in ways that would only matter if you’re actually running it, and not just XWayland.



Even the Direct Rendering Infrastructure and DDX stuff for some video cards from the 90s just got updates last month. And that goes out pretty far from the core code.



As Free Software, X11 can live as long as it’s still useful. Nobody can “take it away” or force you to stop using it.



Finally…



Security! Everyone’s favorite refuge for when they’ve lost all their other arguments.



Sure Wayland can stop applications from reading input events from the other ones.



At least in theory, it can. Everything can be broken. There’s always bugs.



However, I just simply don’t care. This isn’t Windows (where applications can literally just dump dlls into each other and load malware into Firefox, for example).



I don’t have “Linux malware” because I haven’t installed any.



So to me, this “reason” to have Wayland is another fallacious argument.



This same “security feature” is one of the reasons why people have to fall back to X11 to make legitimate software work. So adding “security” that breaks too many real legitimate things is what Linus Torvalds (before they made him go to “therapy” he didn’t need” called “Masturbating Monkeys”).



It’s up there with “Secure Boot” and “attestations”.



But that’s a whole different story.



Recent Techrights' Posts

What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
resist, do not capitulate
Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
It's not happening only in Lenovo
What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
 
Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
To them, it's either Google or Yandex
In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
Site May be Even Faster Now
It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
We're only getting started
Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025
Links 25/04/2025: Slop Fatigue and Patent Judges Flocking to Fake, Unconstitutional and Illegal Kangaroo Court (UPC, Captured 'Justice')
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/04/2025: Night Manager and Devuan in Hosting
Links for the day
Approaching 10,000 Articles/Pages Since Going Static
Trying to silence or derail the site was always a dumb strategy
Windows Falls to New Lows in Nicaragua, Now Below a Quarter (It Used to be Almost 100%)
Another all-time low for Windows
Microsoft is Shedding Off Loads of Staff and That Can be Dangerous Too
Working for Microsoft is a choice; nobody forces you to do it
Richard Stallman and the Unix Philosophy
When asked about systemd people must remember that RMS speaks as an active Board member of the FSF and also the founder of the FSF
The Cost (to Linux) of LLM Slop
Slop 'artists' like Fagioli are far from harmless
Links 25/04/2025: Ubisoft Spyware, Hegseth Fails at Tech on Every Level
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/04/2025: Food Forest Update and Facebook Destroying the Net
Links for the day
Get Rid of Back Doors, Don't Obsess Over Bounties and Other Corporate PR Stunts (or Needless Reboot Rituals)
Security as a term has mostly lost its meaning due to repeated misuse for many years
Serial Sloppers Are Killing the Web (They Probably Don't Care, Either)
Slop is a disease on the Web
Streaming Apps Are “Investor Fraud” That Kills the Planet
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Things Get Increasingly Nasty at Microsoft Ahead of the Fake Results and May's Mass Layoffs Wave
They try to get people to 'resign' so that they won't count as layoffs and the company's 'wellbeing' will seem better
IBM's Debt Ballooned by 8.5 Billion Dollars in Just 3 Months!
Hallmark of a company in a state of disarray, trying to spend its way out of trouble
Big Trouble in GNOME
even GNOME people admit the CoC went wrong
Slopping the Trough: Disney Plus Loses Billions and the Decline of Physical Media in America
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 24, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, April 24, 2025
Links 24/04/2025: GAFAM Problems and No Peace (or Ceasefire) in Sight
Links for the day
Slopfarms on the Web Almost Always Generate Anti-Linux FUD When They Produce "Linux" Output
Welcome to the dying Web
Richard Stallman's Oxford Talk Has Just Ended, Here Are Some Photos
he might hop over to another European country
Gemini Links 24/04/2025: Birthday and Good Work of Academia in Esotericism
Links for the day
Links 24/04/2025: EU fines Apple and Facebook, Another Microsoft GitHub Security Blunder
Links for the day
New Article Explains How the GPL Came About and WordPress Having Copyleft Obligations
Having been involved in the WordPress development community since almost the beginning, I know why it chose the GPL and how it restricts abuse by Automattic
IBM Gained Almost 6 Billion Dollars in "Goodwill" Value in Just 3 Months, According to IBM
Congrats to the management!
In Belarus, Yandex is Now Measured as 50 Times More 'Popular' (by Usage) Than Microsoft
Yandex continues to gain, whereas Bing cannot even register at 1%. Last month it was registered or measured at a measly 0.65%.
IBM Cannot Lie to Shareholders Anymore
"I would not be surprised if we see a layoff every quarter this year."
Dr Richard Stallman (RMS) Gives Talk in Oxford University in 4 Hours
If you live nearby, go there (it's free as in gratis)
Using a Law Firm's Licence to Exercise Politics Through Frivolous SLAPPs and Nastygrams (to Silence People, Remove Pages, Demand Fake or Forced 'Apologies')
Things must be getting really bad when lawyers act for raving antisemites
We're Working to Make Full-Site Search Available
This site has over 1,000 'wiki' pages, many thousands of documents, several thousands of videos, and about 50,000 blog posts or articles. We need to make them easier to find/navigate.
Links 24/04/2025: IBM Loses Many Contracts, Intel to Lay Off Over 20% (Not Counting Those Who Leave 'Voluntarily')
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Can Explain to Oxford Artificial Intelligence Society Why LLM Slop is Not Artificial Intelligence and Why It Hurts Society
another 'crop' of LLM slop that damages GNU/Linux and facts
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, April 23, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, April 23, 2025